Fidele Musafiri, Miner

Folks, please check out Gregory Warner’s profile of Fidele Musafiri, a coltan and cassiterite (tin) miner in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s tragic and powerful and pretty much exactly what we were aiming for when we cooked up the WORKING project. You can hear it at our WORKING Flash site – click on the Radio Stories tab (or the LISTEN button) and it’s the first one. Please also read the reporter’s notebook and look at Thomas Rippe’s superb photos. My hat is off to Gregory and Thomas – this was an extremely hard story to do, physically and emotionally.

The mine where Fidele works has been in the news lately, as fighting has broken out again between military factions and anti-government rebels. As if the people there haven’t suffered enough. Lydia Polgreen wrote a major spread for the New York Times on November 16. She was in the area just before our guys were there. Chilling.

Jon